[prompt] take your fate upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness
No one man, at the end of the day (or his own life), can be so easily summed up as one thing, or another. Life is a series of elaborately balanced roles, intricately played, and as he has been called to play so many of them over time, Martel's long since been aware of it.
It seemed very simple in his youth; a matter of identifying the ideal role and molding oneself into it. Everything could be reduced to goals not yet achieved. Mark a niche, and proceed to claim it - the birth of a lifelong habit. A work ethic and healthy intellect to match his talents served him, then; skill and willingness to hone it made rising in the Order seem at times almost effortless, with only Sparhawk standing his equal peer. Elenia's poor political climate complicated his plans, but ultimately they were simple. He would be the best, surpass even his Preceptor, and when Vanion left that post empty it would be his rightfully. It would be earned.
Without a doubt it was the intensity of his drive and his near-limitless successes that made the depth of his downfall so stark and startling.
In what followed the broken oaths and madness, when the dust and blood had settled, he found himself predictably alone in his bitterness. Having already destroyed so much, he wasn't quite yet the man he would become, the sins he'd die for not all yet committed. As success is work and work and work, so too was his destruction. The bed he'd made was his to lie in, and a stubborn, foolish, willful man - he would choose it for himself. Another role to decipher, new goals and a new identity to go along with them.
Over the course of more than a decade he would break and remake himself; dreadful in its simplicity, an insult to injury. He made himself something glorious, once, and he became its opposite; molded himself, as he had before, into the confines of what his choices demanded. They were his choices, and what he did was done by his own hand. Cruelty and callousness to match the ruthlessness that he'd always had in him. He made an unpleasant enemy and an exacting commander; the foremost mercenary of Eosia, raising armies like an afterthought - allowing himself to fall prey to the worse aspects of his character and cutting out of himself the instinctive remorse of a once-godly man's conscience. Some measure of it had a voice in the disdain he felt for his associates, in the superiority he felt over their more indulgently grotesque pursuits. The part he played became the man he was.
In this same way, now in Valdis, he knows better than to seek redemption, but he might look to reform. As he's played his parts to success in the past, he learns this one, too. He and Candice once discussed his ability to describe his own niche; one of these days he'll have to ask her what it was she thought it 'said' about him, as he was designing it. The remorseful sinner and the eccentric genius. The once-terrible man (not so long ago), now a just and generous Lord of his domain. A trustworthy and scholarly man, if given to questionable humour and flights of fancy - or fits of temper. That he is dangerous goes without saying; that he can present himself as forgiveable does, too. Left to his own devices and given time, he expects the same of this persona as any other - live it long enough, choose it and want it, and sooner or later have its truth. All of it is and always has been no more than choices and expert theatrics - he's always been melodramatic, God knows. Martel is himself, belonging only to himself.
And yet, in the face of the indisputable knowledge the world that his hateful, tired heart loves despite him is without question the better for his absence-
Even the proudest ego takes a blow.
prompt: are you the gold standard or the black sheep?